Chapter 4. Making It
As a very young Maker, I would see things that I wanted and immediately begin to figure out how to make them. At about the age of 9 or 10, I began to make dart-shooting crossbows. The trigger mechanism was a challenge: I would make a trigger and test it, and then another one until I perfected it. The challenge was to puncture an old car tire or a basketball. Most kids want to play basketball; I developed a dart gun that would puncture the skin of the ball. Making a mechanism like this requires thousands of tiny decisions and trial and error: the spring tension in the trigger, the strength of the projectile bow or rubber band, the balance of the darts. As a kid, I was not aware of the lessons I was ...
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